How to expand search marketing reach in the slow season, part 1: Quora

Most businesses typically have a slow season when consumers don’t think of purchasing their services or products.

Despite effective and well-built paid search and social programs, they’re often faced with the challenge of exhausting what they have within their core channels.

So how can they avoid getting into the slump of low volumes and grab incremental traffic to make sure they’re still acquiring new customers and meeting growth goals?

In this three-part series, we are going to explore three channels that aren’t the usual heavy-hitters, but can still be effective at achieving efficiency and incremental growth.

First up: Quora.

What is Quora?

Quora is a platform where users can come, share knowledge, ask questions, and get answers. Although small when compared to larger social channels such as Facebook, it does have over 200 million users and is steadily growing.

Quora has several benefits: CPCs are relatively low, you can reach relevant audiences looking to consume information about your potential business or industry, and you can go after either conversions or app installs.

Targeting options on Quora

Topics targeting: Based on content, Quora will group specific questions and answer pages for users to target. This is where you would choose topics relevant to your business

Interest targeting: Interests are based on what different Quora users have engaged with (asked questions, read, upvoted, etc.)

Lookalike targeting: Leverage your customer list or pixeled audiences as a seed list, and Quora will target audiences similar in characteristics, traits, and behaviors

Retargeting: Of course, Quora offers website retargeting as well

You can also layer in platform (mobile vs. desktop) and location targeting.

Tips and tricks for marketing on Quora

Some helpful tips and tricks to keep in mind as you get started with marketing on Quora:

1) You should always break out mobile and desktop at the start. Users behave and often perform differently on each device. By segmenting them initially, you can have more control over performance and budgeting.

2) Question targeting is the most granular type of targeting you can get on Quora, so volume may be a bit limited. Given that you choose specific questions, this targeting needs to be updated on a recurring basis so you can keep up with new content.

To ensure you are constantly capitalizing on relevant questions, be sure to revisit your ad set – edit it and continue to choose various new relevant questions that appear so that you can continue to expand your reach and get in front of relevant audiences.

3) Compared with interest-based targeting, topics targeting tends to be a bit of a safer bet in getting in front of relevant eyes that are in the moment and interested in what you may have to offer. If you have to prioritize, we recommend testing topics first.

4) To help find additional relevant topics to go after, rather than dumping in multiple topics in the targeting tool, type one at a time and take a look at what Quora auto-populates for you. This will allow you to see additional relevant long tail topics.

5) In terms of creative, try to make your ad ‘native’ to Quora’s experience and overall feel. We recommend keeping things in the question-and-answer format so it does not seem too salesy.

Below is an example:

In Part 2 of this series, we’ll explore the possibilities for advertising on Reddit.